504
PARTISAN REVIEW
Absurd)
to seize on the beat and hip phenomena, as well as the
plague of delinquency and youthful anomie, as cracks in the whole
system, harbingers of a new spirit they themselves only dimly antici–
pated . Though dissent during the period remained strictly theoreti–
cal, the late fifties saw the publication of a number of books, creative
as well as analytical, that were deeply hostile to the dominant spirit
of the age . A number of them became canonical works of the sixties,
much
to
the surprise of their authors, who often failed
to
write nearly
as well once the winds had shifted in their direction. Whatever this
reveals about the uses of alienation in the life of the mind, it remains
fascinatingly true that the cultural revolution of the sixties was one
of the startling instances of the precedence of theory over practice.
The immediate intellectual underpinnings of the sixties are there in
the dissident works of the late fifties.
It
is this ferment of criticism and
theory and its connection
to
later developments that I wish to explore
here .
II
Freud had insisted that all civilization was built on repression,
but American society in the forties and fifties was clearly more re–
pressive than the common good required . Freud had made a similar
point about the late Victorians, but, as Herbert Marcuse was fond of
pointing out, advanced industrial society had perfected methods of
manipulation and control-what Marcuse called "surplus-repres–
sion" -undreamt of by our strait-laced grandparents. Marcuse's
favorite example was the mass media, especially the electronic media,
which had been honed by the Nazis into a unique instrument of
propaganda and totalitarian domination, and which (according to
Marcuse) served as a subtle weapon of conformity even in the demo–
cratic countries, making a hollow shell of our formal liberties and
representative instirutions .
Without accepting this analysis we can acknowledge that Amer–
ica in the early fifties was something less than an open society. The
dominion of puritanism in the arts and in domestic and social re–
lationships existed side by side with widespread intimidation in
public life, in business, and in the professions. Men who had spent
